Page:Christopher Wren--the wages of virtue.djvu/50

16 Legionary in sorrow to the cellules, and given many a brutal and vindictive Sergeant the chance of that cruelty in which his little tyrant soul so revels. For, incredible as it may seem to the lay mind, the ingenious devil whose military mind concocts the ordres du jour, changes, by solemn decree, and almost daily, the side upon which the overcoat is to be buttoned up.

Clattering down the long flights of stone stairs, and converging across the barrack-square, the Legionaries came running from all directions, to gaze upon, to chaff, to delude, to sponge upon, and to rob and swindle the "Blues"—the recruits of the Légion Étrangère, the embryo Légionnaires d'Afrique.

In the incredibly maddeningly dull life of the Legion in peace time, the slightest diversion is a godsend and even the arrival of a batch of recruits a most welcome event. To all, it is a distraction; to some, the hope of the arrival of a fellow-countryman (especially to the few English, Americans, Danes, Greeks, Russians, Norwegians, Swedes, and Poles whom cruel Fate has sent to La Légion). To some, a chance of passing on a part of the brutality and tyranny which they themselves suffer; to some, a chance of getting civilian clothes in which to desert; to others, an opportunity of selling knowledge of the ropes, for litres of canteen wine; to many, a hope of working a successful trick on a bewildered recruit—the time-honoured villainy of stealing his new uniform and pretending to buy him another sub rosa from the dishonest quartermaster, whereupon the recruit buys back his own original uniform at the cost of his little all (for invariably the alleged substitute-uniform costs just that sum of money